Updated September 2018
Welcome to UC Berkeley!
UC Berkeley peers invite you to the Student Food Collective at 2440 Bancroft Way. The collective offers organic and locally sourced products.
Getting Your Bearings
Get to know your new campus by taking a sustainability walking tour! During GBO, our Carbon Neutrality Initiative Fellows lead these tours and offer workshops. Berkeley campus works to continuously reduce our environmental impact. Students lead the way in making Berkeley Zero Waste by 2020, and in saving energy to become Carbon Neutral by 2025.
What can you do? When you arrive, unpack your reusable water bottle and get familiar with the composting bin in your room - use them often. Enjoy the locally-sourced and sustainable food in the dining halls. Turn off unneeded lights and take shorter showers. Getting around is easy with your transit Class Pass, on campus shuttles or by bike. Still working on your class schedule? Look through our list of sustainability related courses. Or volunteer to improve the habitat around Strawberry Creek.
We want to make it easy for you to join us and engage with our community of sustainability.
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The Student Environmental Resource Center is a great starting point for resources and for connecting with existing student groups.
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You’ll also find peer-to-peer education opportunities from the Residential Sustainability Program.
Sustainability Course Spotlight
Editors' picks
Here are just 3 of the 500+ sustainability related courses offered at UC Berkeley:
Course: Landscape Architecture 130
Title: Sustainable Cities & Landscapes
Description: Insights into what makes a city lifestyle more sustainable than suburban living, and how to make cities more equitable and self-sufficient environmentally. The course focuses on San Francisco and Berkeley.
Student Insight: “I learned to appreciate the Bay Area's compactedness as a function of sustainability. This course also inspired me to study city planning!"
Course: ENVDES 4C
Title: Future Ecologies: Urban Design, Climate Adaptation, and Thermodynamics
Description: Intro to methods for investigating relationships in the built environment; Questions about human habitat that could shape the future
Student Insight: “Take this class if you want to understand how the built environment can contribute, adpat, and mitigate climate change.”
Course: ESPM 161
Title: Environmental Philosophy and Ethics
Description: Human environments as physical, social-economic, and technocultural ecosystems; emphasis on ideologies, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior
Student Insight: “A great philosophy breadth course that provides theory behind environmentalism.”
Summer Reading
What are you reading this summer? Here are the sustainability related picks from the UC Berkeley 2018 summer reading list:
Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science
Philippe Squarzoni
Squarzoni’s graphic memoir recounts his experience in coming to understand the immensity of our changing climate. Not only does the book inform readers of these enormous changes, it also illustrates how it is we come to understand new and life-altering ideas. One of my students said after reading Squarzoni’s memoir that she felt “changed.” Squarzoni provides no easy answers, but he does open our eyes to some of the most pressing concerns of our day.
Barkskins
Annie Proulx
Annie Proulx inspires the reader to think about the love of archival research involved in writing this kind of historical novel. She also leaves us with something like an obsession with trees, branches, leaves, massive tree trunks, and a longing for woods and forests. A story of the ecological devastation of the forests of North America, this honest and delicate exploration of relations between European settlers and Native American groups encourages healing.
Stay Connected
Points of Pride
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87% of students walk, bike or take public transit to campus.
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Student fees funded over $2 million for 166 sustainability projects in the last eight years.
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29 percent of undergraduates took at least one course focused on sustainability.
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Chou Hall, our first Zero Waste building, opened in 2017.
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In 2017, we installed our first solar panels on 5 buildings, generating a total of 1 megawatt of green energy.
Students gardening on campus
Students enjoying a sunny day near the campanile